Theatre Record

 

This Edition

 

Issue 23, 2008

Prompt Corner

One mark of a good publicist is their ability to wring a story out of anything in sight. Consequently, all and sundry have been trying to position their particular shows as bucking the trend of the credit crunch, or as the perfect antidote to the recession blues, or whatever. Apparently, for instance, many of the villains – or at least the butts of unfriendly jokes – in pantomimes this Christmas season will be bankers.

Gravy

It came as little surprise, then, that shortly after the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the man whose name is unintentionally but perhaps tellingly misspelt in Mark Shenton’s Stage blog as “Alistair Daring”) announced a reduction in Value Added Tax from 17.5% to 15%, and several days before the reduction came into force, into our mailboxes whizzed a press release to the effect that the West End production of Grease (which has been running intermittently for over 15 years now) would, gee wow!, be passing on that reduction in its ticket prices. “In fact,” said producer David Ian, “we will be rounding our prices down to the nearest logical price-break”... thus giving savings of between 50p and £1.50 per ticket. And while the reduction is unlikely to send hordes thundering to the box-office, it gets some media attention (even cynical attention such as this) which in turn reminds folk of the show’s existence. Hot on the heels of Grease came announced reductions for Mamma Mia, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and The Sound Of Music. All musicals, you’ll note, and all shows which have long since amortised their production costs and so are doing nothing by this move except forgoing a drop or two of financial gravy.

But that rather begs the question, doesn’t it? Why is it newsworthy that businesses are passing on a 2.5% tax reduction to their customers? In fact, if they aren’t passing that 2.13% reduction in price on, why aren’t they? The answer is obvious: it’s a covert way of hiking prices by 2.18% without seeming to. (I know, the maths is a bit arcane, but all those figures are right.) I took the step of contacting the Society for London Theatre, who could give no more specific data than that some productions were reducing their prices, some were postponing a rise, and some were doing sweet Fanny Adams. I wonder how producers and theatre owners can expect government to pay any attention to their pleas for public money to pay for refurbishing their privately-owned premises when they in turn pay so little heed to what are, after all, actual items of fiscal legislation.

Ironic

As I say, though, this kind of response, or non-response, should surprise us as little as, say, the response to another play by David Hare anatomising his disillusionment with the Labour party. Except that there is one surprising element. The cast page of the programme to Gethsemane carries a note by Hare: “Gethsemane is my third recent play at the National theatre drawing on public events. The Permanent Way is pure fact, transcribed. Stuff Happens is one-third transcribed, two-thirds imagined. Gethsemane is pure fiction.” And the surprise is that people interpreted this at face value and even more so.

I have surprising problems with irony on the page (I never appreciated the tone, for instance, of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop until I saw a stage adaptation of it), but even I realised that he didn’t mean it absolutely literally. Yes, it’s accurate in that no real, named figures appear on the stage, but beyond that, I’m amazed that only Aleks Sierz considers Hare’s remark to be ironic. (Aleks notes that the audience when he saw the play included Neil and Glenys Kinnock; my night included former Conservative Home Secretary Leon – now Lord – Brittan and “awkward” Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews.)

Baddies

Still, I concur less with Aleks’s view of the play overall than with those who find it disappointing and reductive. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a colleague about Alan Ayckbourn. My friend remarked that he thought Ayckbourn’s mastery as a writer began to diminish when he started writing occasional children’s plays; after that (he said), the playwright’s characters tended to divide more clearly into goodies and baddies. I think the same can increasingly be said of Hare... although the mind boggles to imagine a children’s play by David Hare. The viewpoint figure in Gethsemane is, as the title itself indicates, not just saintly but almost divinely immaculate in her views.

And the baddie...? Complaints have been raised (inevitably, most stridently by people who haven’t either read or seen it) that the character of Otto Fallon, as portrayed by Stanley Townsend, is anti-Semitic. They are committing the basic logical error of assuming that two elements must be causally connected. Fallon is dodgy; Fallon is (played here as) a Jew; that does not mean that he is portrayed as dodgy because he is Jewish, or vice versa. Frankly, he’s played as Jewish because the character is an analogue to Lord Levy, and there’s an end on it.

Unravel

More imagined villainy in Frantic Assembly’s Othelo. Several reviewers find the element of race adequately present; I’m with John Peter and Jane Edwardes in begging to differ. Once the action is translated to a working-class, urban Yorkshire pub, ideas begin to unravel. How can there be such explicit racism in going out to bash the local Turks and yet no question (except insidiously by Iago) of Othello’s leadership of the otherwise white gang? Pass.

I’ve recently been reading Ammon Shea’s highly entertaining book Reading The Oxford English Dictionary, which includes a number of wonderful, arcane words (e.g. gound: the gunk that collects in your eyes when you sleep). I was all ready to use one such – snirtle: to suppress a laugh – in a review, when I realised that I hadn’t encountered it in Shea’s book, but in Christopher Hart’s review of Gethsemane. Damn. Good word, though.

Ian Shuttleworth |ian@theatrerecord.com

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At the Back

Can You Hear Me In Budapest?

The National Theatre in Budapest has been something of a joke with the locals since it opened, some way down the Danube, a few years back. Allegedly designed by the first director’s interior decorator, it looks from the outside like a minor Las Vegas casino, with flambeaux lining a statue-studded, water-flanked approach. The foyers continue the theme, with plenty of marble and grand staircases – the auditorium itself is relatively modest, but I’m told it has an appalling acoustic. Its well-heeled audience, all glitter and lurex, matches the building.

Arrogance

The low esteem in which the National is held may be raised now by the appointment of its new director, Robert Alfoldi, who is something of a local celebrity, known as much for his TV shows as for his successful directing career. He was previously running the Barka theatre, a thriving venue for Budapest’s smart theatre set. He opened a challenging season at the National with a bold choice, Euripides’ rarely played Orestes, which looks at the killers of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus a week after the murder. In my arrogance I went in to the show unprepared, expecting a re-run of the middle play of the Oresteia, so was mightily confused to find unexpected characters like Helen and Menelaus arriving on stage. A glance at the text afterwards reassured me that the original has been faithfully followed, even to the absence of much participation from the chorus (I thought it had been cut). What I was also unable to appreciate was the new translation, apparently a fine and unashamedly poetic one. That said, the production remains a disappointment, although this is partly down to Euripides, who has a string of characters appear to “do a turn”, rather than developing his interesting internalised treatment of Orestes’ madness, or the strongly sexual relationship he suggests with Electra, who hardly appears in the second half of the play. But even the ill-informed observer could fault Alfoldi’s failure to make full use of a busy if dated set, strewn with trash and possessed of more exits and entrances than a Feydeau farce.

Disorganisation

This visit was one of the sideshows available in this year’s edition of the Contemporary Drama Festival, which as well as setting out (not entirely successfully) to fulfil its principal aim of highlighting new Hungarian drama this year featured a Slovenian showcase. In this I was lucky to see a remarkable instance of theatre-on-the-hoof, when the Slovene writer-director Simona Semenic was joined at a day’s notice by a Hungarian actress, to give a sparky reading of I, Victim, her harrowing but ultimately very human account of the series of unpleasant illnesses she has suffered. Playing confidently with one another (as well as a third performer, the screen intermittently showing Hungarian subtitles), the two created a real and satisfying theatrical event.

In the main, rather truncated Hungarian-language programme I finished by seeing only one show, having already seen Andras Urban’s stylish but repellent Urbi Et Orbi in Serbia where it originated (Issue 20). An attempt to see Curators, a series of a dozen or more sketches about the current funding situation by a mixed bag of enthusiastic amateurs and major Hungarian theatre figures (among them Tamas Ascher, Yvette Boszik, Peter Karpati, Istvan Mohacsi, Arpad Schilling and Istvan Tasnadi – Alfoldi’s Orestes even dashed over to take part), was frustrated by the total disorganisation of an evening which finished at 3am, by which time I had given up to seek a better piss-up in a more efficient brewery. I did succeed in catching the latest effort of Viktor Bodo, whose Dazed And Confused at Katona Joszef was a highlight of my previous visit. Council House Stories 0.1, performed by his own new company, struck me as an attempt to follow Arpad Schilling’s much-travelled Blackland – it even shared the services of writer Istvan Tasnadi – without any of the former show’s elegant style. A series of more or less successful sketches set in an empty apartment, the production bore tell-tale signs of having been developed – but nowhere near enough – from improvisation. It did at least have one of Bodo’s trademark wacky digressions, when a youth choir arrived in the second half to deliver a superbly performed (and, I’m told, very witty) song about the rules of apartment life, departing as suddenly as they had come. Earlier, however, we had been lectured by an actor claiming to be a philosopher, who had apparently been given six minutes to discuss “the Middle”. His halting effort to say nothing at all may have taken less than six minutes, but they felt like more – and gave the terrible news that we were only half way through what was already an overlong, unfocussed performance.

Sideshow

Another group I had enjoyed three years ago appeared in the accompanying programme. The curiously named Bladder Family Circus, a group of actor-musicians who use often home-made instruments, gave a charming account of Daniil Kharms’ Elisaveta Bam. Those who hadn’t seen the Bladders before enjoyed them a lot: those who had might wonder at their lack of development over the years. Another sideshow production featured a couple of former principals from Arpad Schilling’s now dissolved Kretakor company giving powerful performances in Dennis Kelly’s After The End, a production spoilt only by the more or less complete omission of its crucial final act.

Transition

It has to be admitted that this Contemporary Drama Festival gave me little of the excitement or sense of discovery of my previous visit. I would put this down to a moment in Hungarian theatre, not of crisis, but of transition. The National is entering a new phase; Kretakor has split into some potentially very productive fragments; Viktor Bodo is finding his feet with the new company; Balasz Zoltan, about whom I raved last time, is doing very different work; and if Katona Joszef and Bela Pinter, at opposite ends of the subsidy spectrum, remain treading water one can still hope for creative and stimulating changes in both.

Talking of water, there’s room for a brief mention of the highlight of the Festival’s rather truncated international section, two shows in all: Dave St Pierre and a dozen Québecois dancers set out to shock (last year they had a hit with The Pornography Of Souls) by attacking their audience – and themselves – in between shamelessly camping it up in a series of turns that featured the men regularly taking off their clothes to mince around in nothing but shaggy blonde wigs. Yet after this rampant exhibitionism came a finale of rare beauty, as the entire cast, all of them at this point naked, glided across a now water-soaked stage, finishing happily at rest in pairs (with the occasional threesome) as a plangent Arvo Pärt number gently faded. The only dancer lying alone was Sabrina, the show’s commère, who had spent the evening decrying and from time to time graphically demonstrating her opposition to the others’ attempts to achieve what the piece’s title sought: A Little Tenderness, For Crying Out Loud0

Ian Herbert | ian@herbertknott.com

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Contents / Reviews

London
ANY WHICH WAY New play by David Watson	Only Connect	4 Nov	29 Nov	1260
STEVE COOGAN AS ALAN PARTRIDGE AND OTHER LESS SUCCESSFUL CHARACTERS Comedy	Hammersmith Apollo	12 Nov	15 Nov	1295
DELIRIUM New adaptation by Enda Walsh from The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoevsky (Theatre O)	The Pit	6 Nov	22 Nov	1267
GETHSEMANE New play by David Hare (NT)	Cottesloe	11 Nov	24 Feb	1278
I CAUGHT CRABS IN WALBERSWICK New play by Joel Horwood	Bush	13 Nov	6 Dec	1290
IN THE BALANCE New play by John Steinberg and Ray Kilby	New End	5 Nov	14 Dec	1275
LISTEN / AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN Double bill from Varou TC / Shambolic Th	Pleasance	6 Nov	23 Nov	1266
THE LONG ROAD Return of play by Shelagh Stephenson	Soho	10 Nov	29 Nov	1275
LUCKY SEVEN New play by Alexis Segerman	Hampstead	4 Nov	22 Nov	1262
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare (Footsbarn)	Victoria Park	12 Nov	30 Nov	1287
MIND OUT New piece by Station House Opera	BAC	13 Nov	29 Nov	1289
MONKEY: JOURNEY TO THE WEST New circus opera adapted by Chen Shi-Zeng	Monkey's World	13 Nov	5 Dec	1293
MUHAMMAD ALI AND ME New play by Mojisola Adebayo	Oval House	13 Nov	29 Nov	1294
ON EMOTION New play by Mick Gordon and Paul Broks (On Th)	Soho	12 Nov	20 Dec	1288
ORDINARY DAYS New musical by Adam Gwon	Finborough	3 Nov	17 Nov	1292
OTHELLO Revival of play by Shakespeare (Frantic Assembly)	Lyric Hammersmith	6 Nov	22 Nov	1269
PEBBLES ON THE BEACH New play by Joanna Pinto	Old Red Lion	6 Nov	22 Nov	1271
PRIVATE VIEW / PROTEST Revival of plays by Vaclav Havel	Orange Tree	10 Nov	28 Nov	1276
RANK New play by Robert Massey	Tricycle	5 Nov	22 Nov	1265
SECURITY New piece by Zena Edwards	BAC	13 Nov	29 Nov	1268
SHOWSTOPPER! – THE IMPROVISED MUSICAL Improvised musical (The Sticking Place)	King's Head	3 Nov	21 Dec	1261
SIXTEEN UP: A SORT OF LOVE STORY Revival of play by Michael Wicherek (Box Clever)	Unicorn SE1	12 Nov	22 Nov	1277
SMITH New piece by Jacqui Honess-Smith	British Museum	13 Nov	28 Nov	1294
SPECTACULAR New piece by Forced Entertainment	Riverside	6 Nov	15 Nov	1272
STATE OF EMERGENCY New play by Falk Richter	Gate	11 Nov	13 Dec	1285
SWEENEY TODD Revival of musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler	Union SE1	12 Nov	6 Dec	1284
THIS CHILD New play by Joel Pommerat, translated by Nigel Gearing (Company of Angels / Pilot Th)	Southwark Playhouse	10 Nov	13 Nov	1292
ZERO New play by Chris O'Connell (Th Absolute)	Tristan Bates	13 Nov	29 Nov	1291
Regions
COUNCIL DEPOT BLUES New play by David Kirby	Liverpool, Royal Court	4 Nov	29 Nov	1296
THE CRIPPLE OF INISHMAAN Revival of play by Martin McDonagh (Druid Th)	Salford, Lowry / touring	4 Nov	11 Nov	1297
DAVID COPPERFIELD Revival of adaptation by Giles Havergal from Charles Dickens	Colchester, Mercury	3 Nov	15 Nov	1296
DEATH OF A SALESMAN Revival of play by Arthur Miller	York, Theatre Royal	4 Nov	29 Nov	1297
THE DOGSTONE / NASTY, BRUTISH AND SHORT New plays by Kenny Lindsay / Andy Duffy	Edinburgh, Traverse	7 Nov	15 Nov	1307
THE DRAWER BOY Revival of play by Michael Healey	Mold, Clwyd Theatr Cymru	12 Nov	29 Nov	1302
4.48 PSYCHOSIS Revival of play by Sarah Kane (SweetScar)	Glasgow, Tramway	6 Nov	15 Nov	1302
Glasgay! and the Tennessee Williams Festival 2008 See reviews pages for full details	Glasgow, various	9 Oct	8 Nov	1310
THE HORSE MARINES New play by Richard Cameron	Plymouth, Drum	6 Nov	22 Nov	1301
KING LEAR Revival of play by Shakespeare	Liverpool Everyman	5 Nov	29 Nov	1298
THE MAN WHO PICTURED SPACE FROM HIS APARTMENT Performance piece by Cupola Bobber	Manchester, Green Room	7 Nov	7 Nov	1301
OTTER PIE New piece by Fish & Game	Edinburgh, Traverse	26 Nov	29 Nov	1306
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Revival of play by Tennessee Williams	Perth	7 Nov	22 Nov	1309
SUNSHINE ON LEITH revival of musical by Stephen Greenhorn with the songs of The Proclaimers	Dundee Rep	6 Nov	22 Nov	1305
THE TOBACCO MERCHANT’S LAWYER Revival of play by Iain Heggie	Glasgow, Tron	12 Nov	15 Nov	1308
WE’RE THE BELIEVERS New piece with text by Gerard McInulty (12 Star Th / PM Music)	Glasgow, Arches	6 Nov	7 Nov	1306

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